


Reliable

by Haecceity



Category: Legend of the Seeker
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-27
Updated: 2013-11-27
Packaged: 2018-01-02 19:14:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1060555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haecceity/pseuds/Haecceity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brief introspective piece set a few hours before Garen's first scene in "Extinction"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reliable

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brontefanatic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brontefanatic/gifts).



> What Garen gives Darken that Cara and Denna can't -from brontefanatic

Garen was not the best at interrogation. Denna was. Garen was not the best field leader. Cara was. Garen was not yet at an age where she needed to put down her Agiel and leathers to spend the rest of her life choosing little girls with the spark to become future Mord’Sith. Garen lacked the brutality of Constance. She didn’t have the feline grace and cruelty of Dahlia. She didn’t have the political cunning of Triana.

No person, no Mord’Sith, held her loyalty to the House of Lord Rahl as deeply as Garen held hers.

Constance beat her victims bloody, cleaned them up, and then beat them again. Denna tortured for a response. You felt the blade go in but didn’t feel the pain until she decided you should. Then she noted your response and slipped the knife in from a new angle. Triana bludgeoned her way through interrogation and Dahlia most enjoyed the moment her prey thought it might be able to escape. Cara sought obedience, not cooperation.

Garen knew the important question was not what hurt, but what her quarry would try to defend.

Cara was a brilliant team leader. She inspired her subordinates, took pleasure in the hunt, and no one; man, woman, child, or Confessor could remain hidden from her. Garen knew she didn’t inspire loyalty, she simply gave it. She lacked the finesse with which Cara could sift rumor from lies. She did not thrill to the hunt, all of her enjoyment was from accomplishing her duty. Garen was a good team leader but she was not brilliant.

Denna was a brilliant interrogator. Practically each word she said was designed to lay her subject bare and quivering. Each blow was calculated to provoke a maximal response. She easily teased shreds of information from her sessions and built them into mosaics of pain and truth. Each chip of agonized confession bending to Denna’s vision of a whole. Her true love lay in those moments when she and her subject shared perfect love and understanding. Garen ensured the loyalty of her followers. Little more was ever required of her and she had never enjoyed interrogation enough to seek it out for its own sake.

Sometimes Garen wondered if the real reason her Lord Rahl lost Cara and Denna was because he let them have their loves. Hunting and interrogation took them great distances from the bedrock of Mord’Sith life. Physically, spiritually, and emotionally they strayed. Ever widening circles of bloodshed gave them excuses to wander, to be their own authority. Maybe they forgot what it was like in the Temples of D’Hara, the feeling of Sisterhood and shared purpose. Garen couldn’t imagine giving that up.

Garen was an administrator. Her Temple was under her command and her command was absolute. Her Temple was one of the old Temples of D’Hara, a venerable pile of rock with long-standing traditions dating back farther than it was a Mord’Sith’s job to think about. Garen felt that tradition seeping up from the flagstone floor through the soles of her boots. It grounded her, gave her purpose. She chose her people and their tasks. She was entrusted with one of the auxiliary treasuries. Even more precious, she had been entrusted with the Lord Rahl’s double.

Garen was not best at anything. Garen was not brilliant. Garen was loyal. Garen was reliable. Garen was responsible.

Lying next to her Lord, listening to his breathing, she marveled. She was more than the most loyal, she was the most useful. In spite of everything; prophecies, Confessors, the Seeker, the Keeper, she had succeeded in assisting her Lord’s return. Her. She had done what none of the others had managed.

Looking on her Lord’s bare chest in the faint moonlight and feeling the sweat of their exertions drying slowly in the balmy evening, she saw her Lord’s trust extended to falling asleep beside her. Garen could think of nothing she wanted more than what she already had.


End file.
